starts on t.v. dot com. for the one hundred people killed and thousands of homes devastated as to wrenshaw rains triggered flash flooding in a popular southern russian resort area. tension overshadows libya's first election and half a century the cheers in the capital contrasting sharply with boycotts and attacks across the country. and a deadline set for june in the sounders extradition to sweden expires in a matter of hours but the whistleblower remains in the safety of ecuador's london embassy waiting for an answer to his asylum played. international news in coming live from moscow this is r.t. within twenty four hours a day the continuously rising death toll from the massive flooding in russia's

southern cross nadar resort region has now reached one hundred and five people the area was swamped by torrential rain over the past twenty four hours well to blot skate he joins me live on the phone now dennis you're in the region just how bad is the situation where you are. we are trying to get to the flood stricken area which isn't easy with all the roads you know destroyed by the water or jam what we call our five months worth of rainfall within twenty four hours service beautiful beside resort and square merchant aerial grateful granger broke with a good number of parts and kept growing finding our bodies were being found follow along flooded some absurd routes many never managed to get out of her vehicle elements many were called by surprise when by going water filled the ground floor of house or trapping people in foreign walking one managed to climb up roofs on trees and wait for emergency workers to pick them off so little people were

electrocuted when the ripped wire fell into the water that covered the pain and the staggering number of homes or been damaged by the was reading over thirteen hundred people thirteen thousand people affected getting out of dry land isn't easy either highways and routes have taken a heavy hit from the elements walking many escape routes the material can form the damage has been assessed at dollars to thirty million dollars so far the efforts are including while the emergency workers lose local and flown in from all fields try to help people to get to safety provide them with food and warm clothes is important as arrives in the devastated region see firsthand the damage and how it's being dealt with disaster struck in the midst of the holiday season dollars one of the most popular inaccessible beside resorts among russians themselves and flown here every year many of those who don't want to help so instead just setting up a camp on the beach which makes them all the more difficult to find in the few

legion also houses many summer camps for children currently filled with over seven thousand so they will go through the same there is no immediate threat to the young once it's all just war in the brain. which could mean more quality. thanks very much indeed for that live update no doubt we'll hear more from you later when you reach the worst affected areas there in the region in the meantime thank you. r.t. correspondent and eyewitnesses and survivors have been sharing their firsthand accounts from a region devastated by the elements as they reach from these stories of narrow escapes and the loss of loved ones. but. a stream of water hit my car i lost control of the car turned over and hit a tree i just managed to climb out of the back door and cling to the tree because that. noise of the rain was so loud there were two children only by a roof but we couldn't hear them we could only throw someone close to them which

was good but i am relatives who are in the house including the paralyzed grandmother and a young woman with her three month old child last time we got a call from them they said the water level was almost reaching the ceiling and they didn't know how to get out we haven't heard from many. of course will keep you updated on this developing story there in southern russia as soon as we get more information throughout the day here on r.t. . joy tension and sabotage today all characterizing what so far been libya's first elections in half a century the gangs stormed the polling station in the north while boycotts shootings and abductions voting across the country in benghazi losses uprising began protesters this morning burned ballot papers and decried the vote a sham and all more than one hundred polling stations failed to open over three thousand seven hundred candidates are vying for seats in parliament predicted to be dominated by islamists while today less than

a year since former get off he was executed by a crowd of revolutionaries it seems the country is more divided than ever former rebel commanders and tribal chiefs fight for power across libya with little hope that elections will stop the violence. reports. this is the new libya political parties are now free to operate across the country . so too are countless armed groups they one spark to oust moammar gadhafi from power today it is they who are in control now tag militias who answer only to their. commanders have grown more powerful than libya's police and army. which mark we must put limits on these militias because they are dividing the country there while libya is falling into decay almost one year after a nato backed uprising ended gadhafi is rule libyans are taking to the polls for the first time in decades but with tripoli's transitional national council too weak

to quell ongoing violence many fear that elections will do little to bring peace want to go towards the transitional council which they said that they are going to protect this country and if gadhafi gong there is nothing left they said that libya will have national unity where is it. here is what libyan style democracy looks like armed groups calling for more autonomy stormed a polling station last sunday setting voting lists and ballots ablaze renewed tribal clashes broke out in libya's city of this past week alone saw the deaths of nearly fifty people with hundreds wounded and when members of a local militia seized libya's biggest international airport in broad daylight last month security forces simply stood by and watched. they vary in size from gangs guarding neighborhoods to small de facto armies like the one ins in taiwan which still holds libya's most famous prisoner saif al islam when international criminal

court staffers tried to visit gadhafi son they too were seized and held captive for nearly four weeks justice militia style may prove to be the biggest obstacle to whatever government libyans elect some groups are boycotting saturday's vote while others align with various political parties a dangerous trend that could deep in existing divisions secularists islamicists even former members of al qaida are among the nearly four thousand people vying for a seat in the country's national congress the choice of candidates is the will during for some that is precisely the problem this is because. i don't know. how congress need to forgive the winners and just. says i think this is. a million. stained fingers will mark libya's first experiment with free elections but as the cases of iraq and afghanistan have shown voting booths alone do not equal a democracy and in the example of libya the line between freedom and anarchy is growing dangerously blurred whatever the outcome one thing is certain if unhappy

with the result libya's armed groups now know what to do next. we are against. but of history repeats itself we will wage a war. of. more now on how the vote is progressing and what it could mean for libya with political cartoonist columnist and author ted rall what we're seeing scenes of joy from libya smiling voters posing with the stained fingers held up all cheering is this the long awaited new beginning for libya. well those of us who remember what happened during the first election after the fall of saddam hussein in iraq remember seeing similar images at that time and we know what followed we are still dealing with years of civil war and sectarian conflict and the situation there has certainly not settled down you know one of the problems with that the united states has with its regime change operations is that it doesn't understand something very

basic about elections the most and you really should not hold any elections until you've established a civil society in for that matter law and order libya is a country that needs to settle out into an idea of a post gadhafi unified idea of a libyan nation state that all libyans regardless of their sect to their sectarian tendencies and tribal affiliations can get behind until they can do that there's not any point holding an election even if you didn't how violent what you would effectively how is a civil war that's carried out at the ballot box where different sects and tribes are running candidates against one another and trying to dominate their countrymen that way that's not a recipe for democracy if there's just not ready but the national transitional council it's had its day has sort of run out of credibility wouldn't a new fresh national general national congress bring some form of optimism new hope

to the country. effectively at this at this stage you're in a post revolutionary or post counter-revolutionary depending on your point of view situation and at this point law and order is really the top priority of running post gadhafi in libya so whether it's a strongman or a governing council which i would recommend that's composed of. of political figures from throughout throughout the country what you really need is police forces on the street ready to meet a law and order in the service of a libyan state and right now yes the the transitional government is obviously finished but they just can't go from the transitional regime into a democracy at this stage they're just it's just not going to work it's going to add to the instability and prolong the crisis rather than bring a quicker conclusion to it i think libya should have waited years before it got ready for its first elections but do you think those factions who are trying to

sabotage the vote especially in these in the country and of course a lot of talk about the division between the east and west their neighbor could they stand to benefit by keeping the country split and in limbo in the immediate future. well of course i mean under the previous regime tripoli in the west were dominant now what's going on is that the big guys the base rebels feel that they have they believe they have won and they're either going to try to dominate the west the way that they were dominated during the gadhafi era or they're going to break away entirely and follow the model of south sudan and just try to declare independence and we've already seen that with this to see how some of the drape the a statement of like an iraqi kurdistan with its own flag and so on and then just one final question consent of islamist dominating to this vote is that really what the west the nato and its allies wanted when they supported the bringing down

a good death in the first place. i think that what the west wanted was to control to get better access to libya's oil of course if libya wasn't an energy state this invasion would never have taken place and it wasn't in beijing in many ways and certainly the air support was not to be discounted in in changing the outcome of the rebels very clearly there's money pouring in from outside and we're not really sure exactly where it's coming from but when i when i'm guessing such things i try to look at who are the usual suspects i would certainly start with saudi arabia pakistan and so on these are the countries that tend to fund these radical islamist factions and they have energy concerns chio political and religious concerns and ideological affiliations that make libya tempting place to support but you would not ever have any kind of civil conflict in any country if it wasn't it especially a poor country like libya unless you've got money pour in arms pouring in from the

outside temporal political cartoonist columnist and author thanks very much indeed for joining us live here and i'll take thank you well still to come on the program this hour discord in the heart of latin america the ousting of paraguayans president his relations between neighbors a regional expert shares his views on what lies behind the story. the first moscow's condemn the friends of syria meeting in paris describing it as one sided and immoral over one hundred nations taking part in the talks pledged to throw a lifeline to the syrian rebels and urged u.n. action against damascus and on it would include tougher sanctions and if necessary military intervention this undermines last week's geneva conference call by syria's special envoy kofi annan it's all the world's major powers unite have the idea that both sides of the syrian were all behind the violence. right at the center for research and globalization says some powers are just not interested in a peaceful syria. i think at this point these western powers are paying lip

service to the the kofi annan plan and at the very same time undermining it completely by letting weapons come into the country from all sides just a couple of weeks ago the new york times reported a bombshell article of the cia that confirmed the american cia is operating in a base in southern turkey and they're coordinating arms smuggling into into syria to the from the free syrian army and if we look at things like the houla massacre and the kinds of bombing tactics suicide bombing roadside bombing that we see going on in syria now this is not characteristic of syria or lebanon this is characteristic of al-qaeda in iraq. it's not only the diplomatic advantage which seems to be on the side of the syrian opposition but the media one as well and it's always going to explain such overwhelming backing another conflict. syrian rebels have rejected the peace plan that was put forward by the international community

they made it clear that violence would continue so far the coverage of the conflict in syria has been so one sided that it seems the rebels could get away with anything the media in the us and in the west in general have focused only on what the government has been doing almost entirely leaving out the atrocities act of terror committed by the rebels presenting a completely black and white picture but a conflict like the one in syria is never black and white and never simple the slanting of the coverage reminded some of former yugoslavia before nato went bombing former yugoslavia at the end of the one nine hundred ninety s. the media focused on crimes committed by the serbs completely washing down the atrocities committed against the serbs with me here is jim the director of the american council for casa paul so i thank you very much for joining me thank you what are the similarities you see between what's going on in syria and what has been going on in yugoslavia inform you that there are similar as i would say on all three crucial levels as we look at syria one has to do with the international

system the rule of law the role of the security council another one has to do with the status of sovereign states and how you treat a sovereign state that has an insurgency within its borders and the third thing is what we might call on the ground when you take a complex historical circumstance with communities historic grievances and as you said in your introduction atrocities of violence of that are committed on both sides in conflicts like this and attribute only to one side what you do is you to you you come up with the concept of do you fit the facts into the concept you don't take a step back in good faith look at what's really going on and look at the suffering of people on both sides and how in good faith can you who are poor water on the fire to try to calm things down instead would you do as you find a smoldering fire you pour gasoline on it with words like genocide and so forth and then try to set. the stage for what you really want which is a victory for one side the side you've chosen and the utter destruction of the

other side you know and one of the side lights of this in both kosovo and syria is something that's important to me is the fate of the christian population and why is it that in the name of fighting terrorism and promoting democracy and all this other nonsense the united states always seems to find itself on the side of jihad just elements and gaging and terrorism with the predictable results for the christian population as we saw in kosovo when half of the christian population was a box christian serbs had to flee the province and thousands of them were killed by the liberators the cooperation i mean. i think that there are i think there are a couple different explanations for it i think one is our cozy relationship with saudi arabia the gulf states that we want to show we're on the side of our friends who are so important to us when it comes to frankly money and international commerce i think by the way that even in a less dramatic form we're making a similar mistake when it comes to egypt and basically adopting the muslim brotherhood is our chosen voice of democracy in egypt which is also the same force

that stands to benefit in syria if if our policy is successful. thank you mr texas we heard it many times the first casualty of war is the truth and we see it happening time and time again the media urge to simplify matters and to eventually push a certain agenda becomes a weapon in itself a weapon which creates victims of its own in washington i'm going to second. where you can find this in more on line including something that bright lights were sporting the skies of a parts of the u.s. and europe similar tend to sneak you can find plenty more on that phenomenon at the moment to don t don't call plus israel slams the door of the u.n. officials from entering the country on a fact finding mission to expect west bank settlements will not try to broaden out all.

the deadline set by the u.k.'s highest court for june in the sand his extradition to sweden runs out in a matter of hours but the whistleblower says he will not leave the safety of the ecuadorian embassy in london until a decision on his request for asylum in south america is made on the sarah ferguson more from outside a san just place of refuge. it's been nearly two and a half weeks now the julian assange has been holed up inside the ecuadorian embassy here in london after presenting himself on the nineteenth of june seeking asylum now today is the deadline for his extradition to sweden of his appeal to the supreme court in the against a sexual assault allegations failed so would have been the day we could have seen julian assange is put on a plane and sent to sweden and of course the big. legal team have always said is

that he would be then. gets in very strict free trial detention conditions and the overriding fear is that it would make it much easier for him to be extradited on to the u.s. but of course that's not going to happen today because julian assange took that dramatic step to seek asylum and you can see here today a number of his supporters still keeping vigil outside the ecuadorian embassy for the banners of the poor for about seventeen days on a daily vigil we're hearing solitary rashawn change war resister an all star standing with the ecuadorian people in the heart that i might be right decision which is to offer the guy short of a real sense among sister of course is that this decision and the handling of his legal case it was a real failure for the u.k. in terms of defending human rights well now at the same time that you're in a sound just fighting his this battle against extradition we see wiki leaks once

again coming into the spotlight and taking the headlines with a dramatic revelations over a new big leak the syria files more than two point four million e-mails that the group say that they have that they going and have already indeed started releasing and that the inner workings of not just the syrian government but also western countries and western companies as well and that's going to be released in stages over the next. of weeks the last big leak of course the u.s. diplomatic cables cable gates all the syria files even bigger than that eight times bigger in terms of documents and a hundred times bigger in terms of data and already we're seeing some of the revelations from not being explored so wiki leaks once again showing really that it's still able to do what it does best despite the fact that today in a stone age is fierce fight continues surface reporting there but it's well it was pulled its diplomatic staff from paraguayan after being accused by the government

there of meddling in its eternal affairs last month impeachment of president fernando lugo blamed for a deadly crackdown on farms has affected the country's toys with its neighbors and it's going to release it's a sign of the u.s. promoting its interests in the region. paraguayans suffered a coup d'etat literally on the first twenty first of june when its democratically elected president for number new goal was ousted in a twenty four hour impeachment trial it must be the fastest pietschmann in modern history there are such agencies as us aid the united states agency for international development and it all has a lot of other aspects that spillover outside of paraguay he was paralyzed considered together with bolivia the geo political heart in the south america so american control over power of wife will also limited brazil's exit towards the pacific as a brick of the busy all russia india china and south africa and the united states

at the same time as again promoting after that we american free trade association with its traditional allies in our region mexico panama colombia peru and chile so we would serve as a pacific wall against what they consider what the americans consider dangerous brazilian expansion because of the fact that it is not just in the commom within the bric countries but very much so even to a certain extent a political or a potential political ally of russia and china spitzer. u.s. prides itself on free speech but should that same right extend to social media their residences in new york to find out if internet companies should be able to decide what is acceptable and what is not. twitter is instituting a new policy of blocking posts it deems racist is it ok for social media websites to pick and choose what can and can't be said this week let's talk about that.

right but some people still do. but that's the world we live in so should it be out there for people to see or should twitter take it down twitter should take it down so we're free over here in new york where we live free but doesn't the racist person live free to post whatever they want but do you have kids do you worry about them being exposed to racist comments. well that's not good yeah but you can express whatever you want anyway you should be able to express freedom you may not agree was raised as them but do you agree that people should be able to say what they want not in a social networking site like i know why not this is just going to tell us a people should keep their own comments to themselves but that's the whole point of twitter is reading it out something way about what it was that's what it's not ok to use to say whatever you want now the internet you shouldn't just be able to say whatever you want no the rest is the phrases though if you write something it

doesn't have to be racist even though that the words are sometimes you can write some things that all racist but but the words are not so it depends on the human side how you interpreted it you block the negative in the drama but you're also preventing free speech right there so i guess it's a tossup so is it ok for twitter to decide what stays and goes and says their company. again they probably have to have a canal it's a company that judges it because who are they to say what their website true true but who are they say what's racist and what's not there do you think twitter hiding that kind of. racist is going to make a difference and help people not be racist or is it racist is just going to process it's going to happen we've changed it not enough yes i think that's their way of preventing some form of cyber bullying but it's not going to change anything whether or not you think it's right for social media companies to censor content on

their sites the bottom line is this wouldn't be an issue if people would just be better citizens and doubt being raised. an update on our top story for you one hundred five people have died in the massive flooding in the southern russian krasnodar region dozens have been injured and thousands of homes left devastated after five months of rain fell within twenty four hours rescuers are trying to evacuate survivors but the rain is swept away roads and communications making their efforts extremely difficult the areas a popular seaside resort with thousands of russians flocking there during the holiday season so we can bring you the latest information on the disaster as it develops the early on the show which would have been on in the next hour here in r.t. has been canceled well i'll be back with a quick recap of today's top stories in just about four minutes from now stay with

us this is our life in moscow.

that. goal that. i.

would speak. to you. wish. me luck good. luck. and i. don't mind i'm a little. so.